Ian
Washburn
CROSSING BROOKLYN BRIDGE
Tom’s feeling premenstrual. It’s only since dating Leah that he’s tied this long-recurring mood of his – stressed, pissy – with PMS, but he’s convinced now that that the mood isn’t just similar to how girls feel after ovulating, but is the same exact feeling, even if springing from different causes. That’s what he’s convinced: sounds unlikely, but particularly after a giggly yet dead-serious conversation earlier this year with Leah’s severe-PMS friend Alexis, he can’t help thinking it’s true. There’s been this recurring thing for much of Tom’s life where he’s gotten a really thrilling pleasure from realizing, through conversation, that a completely private experience he’s had – like what exactly it’s like to listen to a certain song – the person he’s talking to has had too: and beyond that, that neither Tom nor the person he’s talking to (say his high-school best-friend Isaac, or his college best-friend Jared, or his current best-friend Tyler) had exactly understood the experience before the conversation. There’s something sort of nonsensical about enjoying self-discovery together with someone, but it’s been a huge joy in Tom’s life regardless: and, weirdly, that’s the thing that happened with Alexis in April, except that because Tom doesn’t ovulate, it didn’t make sense, which makes you wonder if he’s been jumping to conclusions about these identical-twin experiences all along. Which I guess is kind of depressing...
But in any case the PMS feeling is now going away, luckily, cause, holy fucking cow: sweet Mother Mary: this is one freaking good Big Mac. Fast food isn’t the only food Tom can afford during slow-work periods like this summer, but it’s probably the only meat, and you’ve never tasted a Big Mac till it’s the first mammal flesh you’ve eaten all week. The Burger King on Fulton, for no reason at all, cancelled their deal on afternoon Whoppers, so this Court Street McDonald’s is the only super-cheap meat in the neighborhood now. Tom is here, upstairs, listening to the Sonic Youth album Sister on his Walkman and eating his first meal of the day, the Big Mac (no fries), and watching a black ten-year-old boy run around and around the floor, laughing. It’s Wednesday, early afternoon, a schoolday, but the kid is probably on summer vacation. He looks downright joyous: and that’s how Tom’s always been about summertime, too.
He takes another bite, chews, and swallows; he closes his eyes, like Mom does to sip wine. Every cell in his body is thanking Tom for this Big Mac. Tom’s dad, who’s an accountant who paid Tom’s NYU tuition, won’t, on principle, send him any money post-graduation (he feels, I guess, that Tom’ll never be a man if he doesn’t learn to support himself), and Tom’s had a hard time finding work lately, so other than fast food he tends to live on rice, beans, and Tyler’s leftovers: and Tyler, who’s a big eater, never doesn’t finish meat. At Tom’s height you need a fair bit of food, and he’s lost ten pounds since graduation, he’s skinnier than ever... but, truth be told, the rice and beans will keep him standing. The only freaky thing is that he might be too broke for them too, soon.
No Tom he squelches this scary thought soon as it occurs: refocusing quickly on the burger and music. At NYU Tom and his roommate Jared used to try to reproduce Bad Moon feedback jams with their electric guitars, but it’s impossible, it just screeches; nobody really understands how Sonic Youth does what they do. Sonic Youth’s genius is their own. Though, of course, only in New York, right? Tom leaves the McDonald’s and walks home. Brooklyn sucks – more than three miles here to CBGB – but at least it’s the City, New York City, the only real City in the world. Better here than the suburbs. Tom lives here in a two-bedroom apartment with his best-friend Tyler, who’s a filmmaker: a very cool, punk, New York type of filmmaker. Tom and Tyler both want desperately to move across the river to the East Village, by where Tom went to college, but Tyler’s parents forced him here: they said downtown Manhattan was too dangerous, but they were comfortable with this area, where some artsy lesbian aunt of his mom’s had a townhouse fifty years ago. Tyler emphasizes, and Tom fully agrees, that Brooklyn is Not New York, but since Tyler’s parents were paying his rent, taking their advice was the nice thing to do, and Tom couldn’t afford to live uptown. Through the Walkman earphones Thurston Moore (who, like Tom, is freakishly tall, Michael Jordan’s height) drones, “New York City is forever, kitty.” That’s fucking right.
Leah comes to Tom’s place straight from her new temp gig manning Random House’s gimpy copymachines. She’s only here to fuck him: she’ll probably hang out and spend the night, but Tom’s long felt that if he had, say, monthly menstruating periods when he didn’t wanna fuck, she’d consistently stay away those weeks. It’s sort of slippery, sticky fucking this evening, cause it’s been in the nineties for like two straight weeks and the apartment’s only AC is Tyler’s, installed in Tyler’s bedroom window. Tom considers it kind of cool and urban (vital, punk-rock) to endure these summers without AC – this is his fourth straight one done sweaty – but it does make for messy freaking. Anyway after Tom comes she comes a third time, and they lie for a bit and then she turns and kisses him and says “Wanna couch, sweetie-babe-cake?” And Tom hears Tyler and Sarah close the front door, arriving home. “Yeah, okay, sure,” says Tom. Couching is slacking, basically: sitting on the couch with friends and just doing whatever: watching TV, listening to records, playing Nintendo, or just drinking beer and joking around. Couching is Leah’s favorite thing in the world besides sex.
Tonight she has a videotape of last week’s episodes of Family Feud, which she seems to think is a funny thing to have. She’s hyped about the revival cause the original show was a big thing for her in high school, but it’s annoying that she doesn’t understand that watching people win thousands of dollars is hellish for desperate Tom right now. And she should understand, cause he owes her money: she’s fucking insensitive about this. And – Tom thinks as pizzafumes finally reach him from under the door and down the hall – it’s insensitive too of Tyler and Sarah to eat Patsy’s right in front of Tom. Tyler, at least, must know how hungry Tom is lately... but on the other hand I guess it’d be pretty touchy-feely and lame for them to be too worried about him. Tyler, especially, has better shit to worry about.
“Yo, sister,” says Leah to Sarah. “How’s not being in Tel Aviv going?”
Sarah, who likes Leah, giggles happily and flaps her arms like a penguin. And when she offers Leah a slice of Patsy’s Tyler immediately goes “Yeah brother you could use some of this, for fuck” but Tom says no. “How bout a PBR? It ain’t Pat Boone, but...”
Does he know? No no, easy there Tom. That Tyler knows about the Pat Boone: that you fucking knew already anyway. Don’t mean he knows how the Pat Boone’s been. Seriously.
“Yeah I’ll fuckin have a PBR,” goes Tom.
Tyler hands it to him and they open their beers and Tyler looks at the record-player playing the Clash album and says “You know, you’ve all heard this before, but for real: This fuckin, like, the Clash? It’s all so over. Rock music’s gone: it’s in the past: it’s ancient history. Fuckin hip-hop’s all that matters anymore. And it’s a little sad.” “Word up,” says Sarah, and Tom and Tyler sip their PBRs. PBR’s kind of gross. Tom’s just being paranoid about them understanding the Pat Boone scene, right? They don’t understand a goddamn thing.
“No Pat Boone in Canada,” Tyler says.
“We’ll take care of you,” says Sarah, not looking at Tom.
“I don’t, really know? But somewhere, I think, there’s Pat Boone in Canada,” says Leah. “When was the last time you were in Canada, Tyler?”
“I’ll be flying up there for the Toronto film festival.”
“Yeah, the Revolutionfest,” says Leah. Trying to hold in two giggles: one about the festival’s silly name and one about Tyler’s weird half-lying. It seems, to Tom, like if Tyler wants to make it sound to strangers like The Toronto Film Festival that makes sense, but it’s weird that he does it even among people who know that it’s a different film festival, one that only happens to be in Toronto. Tyler also does this thing around people who aren’t movie people and would never have heard of TIFF anyway; it’s like he’s trying to fool himself. Shouldn’t he feel cool enough as it is?
“It’s just a ninety-minute flight to Toronto, so I can be there and back in a day no problem. I’ll keep hold of this place for now.”
Sarah really seems to be connecting to Leah right now. “Has anyone, ever,” she asks her boyfriend, “Moved to a city because a festival there showed a movie of theirs?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yeah,” Sarah smiles. Leah and Sarah totally connect.
Tom drinks some of the gross PBR. “There’re interviews and shit, publicity.”
“If I convert to Judaism I’m gonna go by Honest Avraham,” says Tyler.
Leah is tall for a girl – five-nine or something – but she’s like a dwarf next to Tom. This seems to please her: Tom is really tall, six-five, but Leah’s previous boyfriend Neil? Fucking six-six, if you can believe it: Thurston’s height. That – as Tyler has, gently, pointed out at least twice – is the only explanation obvious for why a sharp girl like Leah is dating an unemployed, unsmart, unambitious fuckjob from Philly. She’s just into beanpole guys. But hey! that’s cool-beans with this Philly fuckjob: whatever works. What I guess bothers Tom more is that Tyler told him once that Jared said that Shelley said that Leah said that she’s “more attracted to being attracted to Tom” than she is attracted to Tom. Whatever the stupid fuck that means. Tom doesn’t trust Tyler and badly wants to ask Jared if Shelley really did say that, but he’s ashamed, in front of Jared, that his girlfriend might have doubts about him. Which kind of leaves him in a pickle and makes him tense whenever he’s with Jared and Leah at once.
Anyway Tom (who’s actually coming to like this PBR) isn’t any bullshit like Attracted to being attracted to Leah. So what’s he attracted to then? Her body, I guess. Her encyclopedic knowledge of soul music, her loony-intense love for Otis Redding. And plus her general concern for Tom, even though she makes fun of him sometimes. And plus that she’s okay with Tom’s drugtaking: or at least, she’s okay with the fact that Tom takes drugs. For Leah drugs are just a reasonable thing to do if you enjoy them; at NYU, when Tom met her, her friends were all these really hilarious potheads. For Leah, if anything, doing drugs reflects well on you. Though it’s not totally clear how she’d react to learning the full extent of Tom’s current Pat Boone scene.
For Tyler drugs are just what cool kids do. In his senior year of college he made this film that Tom’s seen several times now. (This is the one playing at Revolutionfest.) It’s forty minutes, he made it with the money his grandfather left him when he died, and it’s called I’m the Fire O Life. It’s mostly in black-and-white and has real New York actors in it and it’s about kids at a Maine college having a lot of sex, making a lot of jokes about Ethiopia, Just-Say-No and Leave it to Beaver, and snorting a really humongous amount of coke. The main character, Jack Cox, whose unseen dad is really mean and disapproving and only loves his horses and sailboats, is trying to find his authentic self and is angrily disgusted by the uptight workaholic subhuman lameness of most of the other kids at the school. There isn’t really a story but there are a lot of Swans songs and color shots of forest fires and at the end he tells off his dad by cordless phone and then gets this dumb, pre-med Korean virgin drunk, fucks her in the ass, and walks off into the Appalachian Mountains and disappears.
Saturdays this summer Leah’s been making phone calls for the New York State and Pennsylvania Dukakis campaigns and Tyler’s been weekending at his family’s place on the Vineyard. Tom’s been left alone. The first Saturday like this was back in May, and Tom spent it fairly boringly, just playing Zelda, listening to Tyler’s Miles Davis records, and stepping out to spend four bucks on the new Friday the Thirteenth movie (which blew). But two days later, at this one actor-guy’s Memorial Day rooftop barbecue in Tribeca, Tom randomly ran into this kid from his high school, Dexter Haas, who “did Ec” at Tufts and now apparently is gay and a body-builder and working on Wall Street as something confusing. Tom had a vaguely negative impression of Dexter back in PA, but 1988 Dexter seems totally cool, and they made way nice at the actor party. And when Dexter shared some of his stash of “wicked Humboldt weed” Tom learned that the ripped homo-yuppie supplemented his Street income selling cocaine. And: “needless to fuckin even fuckin venture to fuckin say, man,” he could get Tom other drugs, too. He particularly recommended this new “engineering” of acid, which he, “Dexter motherfuckin Haas,” had temporary access to.
So this is when summer Saturdays started getting memorable. Push quickly came to shove and thirty-six hours later Tom, in a weird trancelike way, took two-hundred dollars out of his checking account to buy a hundred-shot blotter of acid from Dexter. (Tom’s pretty sure Dexter isn’t actually a dealer, and marked up his own dealer’s price; but whatever, it’s still low. Really Tom was saving money.) The blotter paper, which has singer Pat Boone’s face printed on every square, still, today, six weeks later, is barely half-used, there are forty-one faces left – and some of that was Tyler and Leah! – so it’s not like Tom’s gotten too into acid this summer; but, obviously, he has been tripping frequently. I mean what the fuck, right? Summer vacation. The way this first got going though was, Tom didn’t tell Leah or anyone else about the blotter till that following Thursday, when he and Leah and Tyler were all out in the living room in their weekly Cosby Show ritual (Corona and delivery Mexican; Leah’s hilarious imitations of Cos, Phylicia Rashad, and everyone else; and, usually, an umpteenth-time reminder from someone that the show’s set only a mile southeast of here). Sarah was in Tel Aviv, and during the first commercials Tyler mumble-asked Leah what she might be up to that weekend...
Leah told about a publishing party that Tyler was totally welcome to come to; Tyler bobbled his head and said, “Well we’ll see.” Meaning that it sounded suck. He mentioned that he might see what Vinnie D was up to, and Tom – who, again, hadn’t told Leah about the acid before this – went, in an unplanned blurtout: “I have some acid we could drop before we hit the party.” And Tyler looked impressed, and Leah looked surprised; and Leah looked sort of hurt, too, but whatever, Tom only hadn’t told her before because she makes him feel like such a layabout loser all the time, she had no right to be hurt, it was her fault.
So of course they did it, and they didn’t make it to Leah’s party or anywhere else, though tripping Tyler talked and talked the whole night long about how they had to get outta that apartment, had to hit Fucking New York, had to hit the happening, howfar the happening was just didn’t matter... He didn’t, however, manage to stand up, so basically they stayed in, tripping pretty hard, Leah venturing at one point the sixty feet out to the bodega to buy some smokes for herself and some six-packs for everyone but otherwise all staying put. Records – Filth, Surfer Rosa, and Marquee Moon – provided most of the experience.
And the experience was pretty good. Mostly in Tyler’s AC’d room, since the heat and humidity were pretty brutal that night. Tyler mumbled more or less constantly over the music about underrated noise bands, the lameness of Bowdoin girls, what his father admired in people, and where Orson Welles used to drink in Rome; Leah handled the conversation and made sick, hilarious, inexplicable jokes about Rita Hayworth’s wedding-night diarrhea but also made it very clear somehow that all she really wanted was to go to Tom’s room to freak; and Tom, who wasn’t feeling freaky at all, just sat silently, hippying out over the crackling of the wide amber floorplanks, the confusing pattern of Tyler’s Persian rug, and the bulgy mortar in the big brick wall. It wasn’t clear, to Tom, if this wall’s mortar was more disorderly than the mortar of other brickwork; or if he’d just never paid appropriately serious attention to mortar before; or if, in reality, this oozing, slipping, bubbling mortar was, in fact, completely normal and he was just on acid. He figured probably he was just being druggy, and Leah reminded him mockingly that he hadn’t known many exposed-brick walls in his life; but still, the chance that the wall was collapsing, even if in extreme slow-mo. That was unnerving.
“Held up a-hunderd-fifty years.” Said Tyler. When Rita Hayworth was two weeks old, said Tyler in a bad John Wayne drawl, and livin a mile from thishere wall, thishere wall was eighty years young already, then. And if that, thought Tom intently right then, if that ain’t really fucking trippy. Really. But he didn’t say anything.
Anyway come Saturday evening (they’d stayed up all night and slept all day: at nine in the morning still-tripping Leah had called in sick to the Dukakis campaign) it was pretty clear that Leah and Tyler were sated on drugs for a while, but Tom felt like he was just getting warmed up. And that presented a problem. The solution to the problem came to Tom a week later, the following Saturday morning, when he woke up in his sweaty, stinky little unairconditioned room and realized within seconds that if he did a halfhit right now he’d be normal by the time Leah got home. Probably. And so he cut Pat Boone’s face in half diagonally (no scissors in the house so he used a steak-knife), he licked the halfhit onto his tongue, and whammo. Or no whammo, awhile, and he considered going back to sleep, but... before he knew it... It’s even better when you’re alone. That day he walked south down Court and Clinton streets through Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, all of old South Brooklyn, all the way down to the Red Hook waterfront. He bought an ice-cream cone and a plum and a greasy calzone and ate them all. It seemed like a somewhat long walk at the time, and it definitely seemed like an adventure. South of the horrifying BQE overpass (where he didn’t actually visually hallucinate a colony of bats but nonetheless had a strong sense that one was near: a really big one: dragonlike creatures: thousands of flapping wings) were some projects, a lot of half-eaten corncobs on the sidewalk, and eventually a bunch of soccer fields, where Tom, still oily and sticky from the food, joyfully watched a Mexican team play a Salvadorean team. He couldn’t really follow the game... And back in Tom’s neighborhood were a slightly frightening number of shiny black Coupe DeVilles parked outside brownstones: and he remembers realizing that had he been sober, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed this creepy doppelganger effect, where it seemed like the exact same Coupe-brownstone twosome was teleporting or being teleported from street to street to street, secretly; but had he taken a full hit, this’d probably have terrified him to the point of misery. That insight, or just that love for ordered chaos or for Goldilocks drugtaking or whatever: that was a big thing, for Tom.
Anyway by the time Leah got off work he was sober. Tired but sober. Leah didn’t even come back to Tom’s apartment – she went home, and they didn’t see each other that night – but he made a point of checking with the clock that he was normal then. He even called his smart sister Brenda in 215, to make sure no-one could tell. And it worked. And though he considered telling Leah, he figured it’d just annoy her or weird her out. It was a small thing. He did tell her where he’d walked, and he told her what he’d ate.
From there, of course, the habit grew. Of course he started halfhitting on the days when there was no work, and of course one day he didn’t even go to Midtown to check. He was, and still is today, extremely angry at himself for having let Leah and Tyler know that his blotter was hundred-shot: because of that screwup, his dropping alone is sure to emerge, eventually. Once she got back from Tel Aviv, Sarah, who seemed unthrilled about the new acid fad, started to ask Tom regularly how much was left, which needless to say made Tom very uncomfortable. Could he claim he sold the remains back to Dexter? Except that Tyler’d wanna talk to Dexter to buy his own... No. They’ll learn. It’s coming. Just delaying the inevitable now. Unless he broke up with Leah and told Tyler he gave it to her as a going-away present? Whatever. Cross that bridge when it comes. Probably he’s just being paranoid; for now he oughta just enjoy the drugs. The drugs make him dig the world a lot more; he loves to walk, doused in sweat and tripping hard, down from Midtown through Lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. Ugly old women in white fur coats, glass and steel and whitebrick towers, Bowery beggars and crazies and dumb 1970s crust-punks and lampstores; little Cantonese men and briny Cantonese smells, normal 1980s punks like Tom, Bowery rats and pigeons and inexplicable children, bulgy yellow taxicabs, more bums, bums galore, the weird richness of wino breath, the width and weird prettiness of the Bowery, and, best of all, the Bridge, rising up from the summertime city into the sky, with tourists and bikes and the shimmering water. And from the Bridge to peer down upon Long Island’s longness: it’s a hundred miles farther past Brooklyn to Montauk.
He absolutely loves this whole thing. The stimulus buildup gets greater and greater: glinting sunlight and men in suits and gyro smells: it’s like Tom’s ODing on the world, but it’s thrilling. It’s kind of messed-up that these days the deepest, inmost part of Tom, the part that he doesn’t know how to show to others, is also the part that’s most outwardly-oriented. And it seems like it’s only become that way lately. Along with the silly, dumb, ridiculous druggie stuff (believe it or not, at one point he had a real hard time convincing himself that the Greek-looking coffeecup didn’t expect a vocal response to “WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU”) is a kind of refreshed capacity to receive shallow world-impressions: it’s dorky, but everything just seems freaking neato these days.
But sometimes it gets intense. He doesn’t literally hallucinate – no-one does, he’s convinced – but he senses, he intuits, hidden realities. Sometimes, predictably, his realities are those horrible auras of evil long-familiar to dreamers and druggies both; but other, subtler times it gets all specific: worms, say: and the rats and creeping centipedes, all down there wriggling through the underlying soil; it’s all going on down there, down beneath his feet, through shoesoles and pavement... The stink down there; the centipedes nibbling through his skin; and wriggling up and down his veins; nibbling out through the tip of his cock... awful... And other, randomer stuff, too, like animal-ghosts. That one had big, big consequences.
It was this one recurring freakout of all of June, starting with the first time in Tyler’s bedroom: Tom would return mentally to the presence of these furry animals, these like bucktoothed... these beavers. Beavers, yes: long since dead, but their undead beaver-souls prowling about, unseen. He sensed their presence. He sensed it while he was tripping: and sometimes? he even sensed it while he wasn’t. They were huge, Toyota-sized beavers, and they’d ruled New York in days gone by .
Yeah... And so for a while, okay, ghosts: that just seemed like this weirdly recurring standard druggie tripout. But what’s really, really fucked-up is, they really did, as Leah’s sciencey friend Antonia later brought to Tom’s shocked attention. Antonia (Antonia’s awesome, by the way, Tom really digs her: she has bushy eyebrows, huge tits, and is Leah’s height and kind of fat; she does something computer-related for some sort of consulting company or something, in Midtown; and she has this fake-sultry way of talking to people that isn’t really sexy but is kind of witchlike or vampirelike except with a Jersey accent) Antonia, this one Tuesday evening, was smoking with Leah in Cobble Hill Park and Tom was just kind of hanging out on the parkbench there, watching them smoke I suppose: this was like a week or two ago: and Tom and Leah were telling her about how much they’d enjoyed doing acid. Leah was saying something silly like “Colors get separated from the objects they’re the colors of” and Antonia was chuckling out smoke indulgently and then Tom stopped them totally short by going, in monotone, “My thing was, I felt a strong emotional connection with the invisible presence of a giant beaver.
Silence. And for a moment they looked at him like he’d said he raped his grandmother or something: but then they both cracked up, happy and impressed, Antonia saying “Wow!” and Leah saying “Baby!"
“Now that’s like wild,” said Antonia.
“Why didn’t you tell me, baby?"
“It um it was messed up, it was like they were ghosts of animals that’d been there, like right there, before."
“Oh baby you should’ve told me, baby."
And Antonia, nippleswiveling: “Well they were!"
“I was just all trippin out I didn’t tell anyone."
Tom hadn’t heard Antonia. “What do you mean?” Leah asked Antonia.
“Giant beavers, in Brooklyn.”
“I don’t get it,” said Tom.
“What, you dunno about this?! It was uh, what was it? Shit... Shit... Shit...”
It was during the regional reign of great mammals during the Somethingtide ice-sheet recession, she said eventually. 8000 BC.
Whatever. To Antonia Tom just mumbled about having been a child paleontology buff, that probably explains it; and then, suddenly uneasy about a slang meaning of beaver, he quickly changed the subject.
But, goddamn it, against his better judgment Tom knows – he swears, in his heart of hearts he knows – he’d never heard of these things in his life before this. Except through intuition.
So... well, clearly his heart of hearts is wrong: he’d heard something somewhere. There’s a lot of shit our minds don’t tell us about, right? Secretly bouncing around in there. So for a smart person this would’ve been no biggie. But for dumb Tom: Tom found this so, so eerie – eerier than he’d ever found anything, seemed like. They were real... Like sensing suddenly that somebody’s watching. Like... like the presence of ghosts, of ghostly worlds. Like the ghostliness of this, our world... Not just being alarmed: like you knew, before this, that you were being watched, you just didn’t want to believe it. That’s what it felt like. But, well, maybe it was just drugs.
Was it just drugs? Probably Tom’ll never know; whatever it was, a new kind of zeal soon took possession of him. In the days following he felt the draw of the hugeness of an unknown world: ancient or ghostly or secret, it felt like. He suddenly felt like something inside him was on the verge of an outward expansion: he suddenly felt like something magical was happening, a reordering of the world. He felt extremely grateful to God for having brought together him and Dexter’s acid. But beyond this awe at the heaviness of it all? he wanted really fucking badly, fucked-up as it was, to learn more about those oversized beavers.
And that’s how it all started. How the dumb, nerdy-druggie reading jones started. He’d never, ever read a book without pictures by choice. He’d had a period in high school of reading books on the Velvet Underground, and they make English majors read pointless stuff like Shakespeare and Beowulf and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; but the music books have photos, and the English shit shouldn’t count. This thing was very much of a first, and it was very unforeseen that Tom would get into this.
He went to the giant library on Fifth. This went like something out of a Hollywood comedy cause at first it was really dramatic and serious-seeming – there are white columns and lions, they make you feel like you’re being welcomed into some special new world – but then, just at the peak of Tom’s awe, the security-guard woman told him he needed to go across the street to the smaller, undramatic branch. Total letdown! But anyway he got his library card, dropped a halfhit of acid in the elevator and “browsed” for a while, finding no giant beavers in the science section, no giant beavers in the New York history section, and eventually just getting a book called In Suspect Terrain, which was geology but which from a flip-through seemed to address what New York City was like around 8000 BC. And which seemed to talk about Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania, too, which Tom figured might be fun for him since that was around where he grew up (in the AD 1970s). A picture of an old painting of the Delaware Water Gap was on the cover, and it in 1869 was recognizably the same place as, at least, in 1985, the last time Tom had driven through there.
After checkout he took the library book to Bryant Park and sat next to a sleeping homeless guy at a table there. There was a drug dealer on the other side of the park looking at him hungrily, but Tom didn’t have any money anyway. He turned on Sonic Youth on his Walkman, and the acid started to kick in just as he began to read. As always, he started to freak out about how sweaty he was, but soon he got over that and focused intensely on the printed words in front of him. The book seemed horrifyingly darker-shaded than everything else, but that wasn’t actually frightening, it was perfectly normal: that’s what happens when the sun is right behind your head, Tom. He focused on reading.
After a paragraph he suddenly started crying. He hadn’t cried in years. The book hadn’t mentioned giant beavers yet, but what Antonia had sort of talked about in passing – ice – which Tom hadn’t even thought about when he’d been thinking about the giant beavers: this book was talking about that, the Ice Age, except what it said was that the Ice Age was just beginning, and that very very soon the ice which had once killed all New York life would come again.
Is this true? We’re still in the Ice Age, just in a, what, an “interglacial”? A southward creeping mile-high sheet of ice: overtaking all the Northeast: picking up Tom’s beloved New York, depositing it down back in fucking Philadelphia... Kind of a crazy moment, this. In sunshiny Bryant Park, crying hysterically. Stupid druggie. Obviously the Ice Age bullshit was something that had he been sober he’d just have said “Whoa, trippy” about, at most, but with Tom literally tripping, it felt not trippy but tragic. I guess ice is scary. Thurston Moore was rapping through the Walkman about how well he knew New York City, and the homeless guy was still asleep. And Tom got worried all of a sudden then: cause normally his size makes him comfortable in almost any sketchy urban scene, but now that he was weeping, and over a freaking geology book, well, park bullies might reconsider. Maybe go back to the library to read: it’s not as hot there anyway.
And that’s how it started. Even after the acid wore off he stayed in the library, feeling sort of emotionally beat-up, reading everything he could find about when the ice was here, what it was like, and when it’ll be coming back again. The North Pole, expanding outward: this great growing Antarctica’s creeping progression south: cross Canada, New England: sponging up Quebec and dropping it on top of us, boulders and dirt and cars and fucking Canadian beaver-corpses and everything, right on top of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan: cause back in the day the ice stopped just north of Tom and Tyler’s apartment, like just a five-minute walk! Right at the Bridge, right at Patsy’s, it was like the coast of Antarctica! fucking penguins! Awful, flapping penguins! Tom still can’t explain this ridiculous freakout of his, cause he’s never been the type to be concerned about things like ozone depletion or nuclear war or whatever: that all always seemed silly and unreal to him; but now here he is reading about a far more distant threat to his descendants’ physical survival, ice, and it’s like consuming him, angering him, keeping him up nights. Lord knows why this is, though I guess it’s partly the acid, and penguins are scary. And I mean, can’t they stop this? The reglaciation of New York City? Aren’t they upset about this? Can’t they boost global warming or something?
Besides the ice stuff, which at least he understands why he’s reading it – terror – he’s been doing too other New York books. Some of the books you can’t check out and so he goes to the big, dramatic library to the research rooms, where there’s a shitload of books and old maps in Dutch and stuff. After the first week or so he started reading less when tripping and more when he wasn’t tripping; his thing now is taking a halfhit right as he’s ready to start the long walk home; he’s been obsessively going through books about Lower Manhattan in the seventeenth century, thousands of years after the giant beavers and hundreds before Sonic Youth – which are cool books and all (the Dutch words especially) but for some stupid reason this reading feels as fear-driven as the Ice Age stuff: which, maybe Tom’s stupid, but seems not to make any sense. Being scared of being crushed by ice is one thing: that makes sense. But who cares about a bunch of dead Rotterdam colonists? Anyway for whatever reason Tom’s gotten it in his head that he really wants to own and that it’s really important that he owns, at home, this giant series from a long time ago called The Iconography of Manhattan Island; but the thing with the Iconography books is that they’re old and hardback and the series is altogether like ten-trillion pages long. So he’s kind of excited now about waiting till Christmas and asking his parents to buy the series for him then. If they can find it.
And they’ll be pretty surprised. Nobody – ever – imagined goofy, spacey Tom growing up into a history buff. A freaking geology buff? This is the kid who couldn’t make it through Cujo, who once gave up his best friend in the world, Isaac, after deciding conclusively that he’d never be interested in the freaking Mark tanks of freaking World War One and that for all the soul-companionship he got from that friendship those endless stupid conversations just weren’t worth it. Which is to say, Tom is not a reader. The whole thing’s screwy.
But hallucinogens and popular nonfiction can go really well together for guys like Tom, right? His thing this July is he reads a bunch right before he drops acid, and he gets off, I guess, on the sensation of ten-million thoughts and thought-connections bouncing around in his head, but he has little or no interest in actually thinking his way to anything: in producing anything, like as a result of the thinking. Which is to say, I guess, that it’s the journey not the destination: having a lot of cool and crazy shit about plate tectonics and slutty Lenape squaws bouncing around inside of you, that’s great and all, but with acid? it’s like you take all that crazy shit and like throw it in the Cuisinart and fucking hit Puree, man. More memorable journey: much much more. And that’s, I guess, the thing. The stimulus-overload, the ODing on the world, that gets Tom off when he’s on acid? Learning shit about rocks and Dutchmen can be that same thing. It’s all just the neato thing: making life more interesting. Appreciating how crazy things are. It’s not like he really cares.
It’s not like he really cares. It’s not like he really cares... Although, well, it’s tricky: he emphatically doesn’t care about the 1630 beaverpelt industry, like, in the way that Leah cares about the Dukakis campaign. Obviously that’d be stupid. But as he takes more and more of the acid this July he is wondering. That sense he had before, when Antonia gave her spiel: that creepily creepy sense of an ancient-ghostly-or-secret somethingness. Maybe that was just his dumb, silly way of reacting to the sudden trippy realization that he, Tom Weiser, had, and has, absolutely no fucking idea of what’s going on. Right? Not that he has no idea how things work (he’s always been aware that the workings of his TV or body or electric guitar might as well be black magic as far as he knows or cares), and certainly not that he has no idea what’s happening in like Bhutan or wherever, but just that he has absolutely no understanding, when he looks out through whatever window, of what it is he’s looking at...
It’s kind of like the time when Leah and Tyler were arguing friendlily about Robert Bork – Leah, weirdly, thought he should be confirmed – and Tyler didn’t know that he’d been ordered (by Nixon) to fire those Watergate guys or even that Supreme Court appointments were for life, and Leah had later seemed not scornful but just downright confused. Like she just couldn’t understand how Tyler could be arguing when he was that completely clueless. Like: you don’t get what’s going on at all, what are you even doing here. Except drastically trippier than that, this new thing of Tom’s, because rather than it being some dumb pointless hot-button political thing that he’s realizing his ignorance about, it’s everything, it’s the most basic, relevant terms of his existence. I mean of course Tom genuinely does not give a flying fuck in hell that at one point in the distant past there were beavers, however big, scurrying along Atlantic Avenue; it’s not like, from Tom’s perspective, the fact of those beavers’ having stood on the soil beneath Tom’s feet, or existed at all, matters. But fuck it, let’s be honest, he takes it back: it is probably true that in a sense he does care, that his new impulse to appreciate better how crazy things are isn’t an idle, fun, why-not thing but instead feels sort of urgent. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit this – this urgency feels like a product of both uncoolness and stupidity – but that’s what’s going on. He’s uncomfortable with his bland curiosity, but he’s even more uncomfortable with his current all-encompassing cluelessness... cluelessness... And he leans groggily to a cockroach on his windowsill and crushes its head with his thumb. Headjuices burst: Sayonara, sucker. Tom wipes up the remains with a bedside paper-towel, very careful and thorough about this – since moving to the city he’s heard repeatedly that cockroaches are attracted to the smell of roach-carcass. This seems strange and illogical, but he trusts popular city wisdom. He wonders what the juices would look like if you crushed his own, antennaless head: I guess it’d mostly be just like normal red blood that’d squirt out onto the walls and the bedsheets and the rug? brainjuice? but no, Tom, no: that’s unhealthy thinking. Fucking exploding heads: fucking bats: fucking bugs, bricks, beavers, penguins... Jesus Christ. Now look at Tom here. He’s naked: and he can hear Taxi Driver from the other room: and he can smell the stinky socks and boxers on the floor and the sticky summer evening outside. He can feel, and smell, the sweat-slime buildup on his scrotum, he can feel the weight of his cheekbones pulling down his eyes. Tom’s a goddamn mess here. Although he hasn’t dropped acid in almost two days now, which he’s very proud of, Tom, let’s face it, hasn’t been completely sober all summer. His long, skinny legs suddenly look to him like they’re crumpling and blackening: like the outside of a marshmallow after you accidentally set it on fire. I thought I never hallucinated? There’s a bruise on his thigh that may have come from sex with Leah but probably he fell on the Bridge or something, when he was tripping.
When the Taxi Driver score hits a loud, heavy chord the white wall looks briefly apple-green to Tom. And the scariest thing? is that this sound-seeing, and all of this, seems normal to him. After he farts the room hues blue, and That’s fucked-up, Tom: that’s not normal, Tom: you aren’t on acid now, Tom, that shouldn’t be happening, this isn’t right... How’d things get to this point so suddenly? This summer has been like a just-say-no movie watched on fast-forward. And isn’t the idea that when you’re getting strung out on drugs you don’t realize it? He has a vague sense of just-say-no movies suggesting that; he wishes it could be that way for him. Blissful wasted ignorance. But instead he’s haunted by memories of 1960s stories: Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson: humans brought by acid to the mind-state of a sea anemone.
For better or for worse, Tom understands that he’s changing. The greatest new presence is fear: he’s frightened. He’s frightened that tiny, invisible insects are gonna infest his body, wriggling in through the sweaty skinpores; or that a giant, visible insect will crush his skull in its mouth, and that instead of just collapsing his skull will actually pop. He’s frightened about that fucking, ugly, stupid uncovered wall in Tyler’s room: that the bricks will crumble or the mortar will slip and the whole thing will tumble down and bring the building with it, burying Tom and Tyler, and their lovers, in thousands of bricks from 1838. He’s frightened, hell, of acid: that tomorrow’s acid will finally take his self away – that that thing which comes and goes from sight but which Tom knows is what is truly him will vanish in a flood of like “dopamine” or “serotonin” or whatever the fuck goes on up there. He’s frightened that he’ll never stop taking acid ever again, and he’s frightened that he has to stop. And, yeah, he’s frightened most of all of ice. Of its slow horrible creep down Broadway, of the new Ice Age, of the cold’s final triumph once we burn our last ounce of oil. Frightened I guess of the fragility of everything.
Pat Boone, who’s gotta be in his fifties by now, was sort of the alternative to Elvis when Lou Reed was growing up. Lou Reed liked Elvis and didn’t like Pat Boone, and this meant a lot to him the way it meant a lot to later kids (like, to take two very tall examples, Thurston Moore and Tom) to like the Ramones instead of the Eagles. So Boone kind of represents the seed of everything Tom has always hated the most. Tom doesn’t really know much about Pat Boone himself except that he’s very clean-cut, suburbany, and that his cells carry exactly the same Y-chromosome as his great-great-great-great-grandfather Daniel Boone had – Daniel who was born near Philly and I guess did some frontiersman thing? but as far as Tom is concerned was basically just some oldtime famous guy. Tom’s tired: whatever... I guess Pat Boone was Christian, too: like Presbyterian Tom... Acid Tom’s Eucharist: ODing on Creation, Tom... And I wonder if in the year 2219 Tom’s great-great-great-great-grandson will be famous for the surname Weiser. For carrying exactly intact the Y-chromosome of that great late-twentieth-century New Yorker: Tom the Acid-Eating Temp. Somehow I kind of doubt it... How would Pat Boone handle Tom’s current situation? It’s the Twenty-sixth today, New York State’s two-hundredth anniversary, and it’s Tuesday, and Tom hasn’t even gone in to Kent since his receptionist gig at that healthcare company ended last Wednesday. Did it end or was he fired? He’s broke and strung-out and even skinnier than a month ago, and it’s obvious now that he’s gonna have to borrow a further four-hundred from Tyler for August.
And what if Tyler says no? Would Leah take him in? freaking Mom and Dad? Oh, Christ... And what if Tyler says yes? He should drop some acid, but he doesn’t. He goes out to the living room and Tyler, with a PBR and Goldfish and wearing only some short, tight octopus-print boxers, looks excited to see him up and pauses Taxi Driver. Tyler’s being really nice and makes Tom take some Goldfish, and they end up having a talk about Tom’s brother Chris. Tyler loves to hear about Chris. Chris will never receive Tyler-style monthly checks from his parents, but Tyler clearly thinks he’s cool.
The weekend after Chris’s birthday a few weeks ago, Tom knew he had to make a PA appearance but didn’t want to, so he lied to his family that he had work on Friday. Saturday morning he trained down there, and Sunday morning he trained back here. Tom really quite likes Chris, but it gets more and more awful every year being around him and Dad at once. Like... well for instance, it’s different with Brenda – Brenda just finished clerking for a federal judge in Philly and is moving to Manhattan next month to be some confusing form of lawyer – with Brenda you have that thing where she’s a success and Tom isn’t, too, but it’s completely different with her: she’s older, and she’s been the brighter-star for Tom since he was like two years old, and there’s the gender thing, and he barely even knows her; and, plus, and probably most of all, even though Mom and Dad wish Tom were more like his sister everyone knows that swimming-stardom aside she’s basically just this sarcastic, corporate, cynical yuppie martini-drinker: everyone knows there are folks out there who’d rank Tom higher. Even Mom, maybe. Chris, though, Chris is different, Chris is supposed to be just the younger brother but he’s annoyingly fucking clearly gonna save the world and make millions and like Sonic Youth and marry a woman who’s both smart and beautiful.
But that Sunday on New Jersey Transit, chugging from Trenton back toward New York after pancakes, scrapple, and Reverend Swenson’s idiotic sermon, Tom – delighting in the rock-ripples, ancient moraines, and slowly eroding hillsides that he’d never really perceived before, rockforms telling of tens of thousands of years of happenings, ice and non-ice, but hard to notice easily underneath all the billboards and TGI Friday’s restaurants unless you’ve been reading lots of geology books and taking lots of acid – felt a kind of blissful oneness with the rock, soil and people of New Jersey, and with his own people, his Pennsylvania family, and he resolved to visit Chris in Newark before the summer was over. Brothers need time together away from other family, to make their connection real. Today, though, hell, two acid-washed weeks later, he’s thinking he probably won’t bother: Chris hasn’t bothered, and if they’re gonna bother in either locale they might as well bother in New York. It’d be fun going out to some scary Newark bar, but from the way Chris talks it sounds like he’s pretty wary of that kind of thing. Chris isn’t nearly as big as Tom, but he’s bigger than average, with wide strokeman’s shoulders: if he’d ever lived in a city he’d know he shouldn’t worry. But he hasn’t: he never went into central Philly as a kid like Tom spent high school doing, he’s spent his entire life first in the suburbs and then in fucking Princeton. What must Chris be thinking of Newark, anyway? Probably not much; after all, Newark’s how suburban kids imagine all cities being. And the Episcopalians have probably got him trained to not explore too much.
Once during the schoolyear Tyler told Tom that he imagined Chris – “the philanderer” – “philtering Princeton chicks with schnapps and red wine”. But it doesn’t really work that way: Tyler pictures Chris’s life as like David Lee Roth’s but actually Chris is into longterm relationships and is a very devoted, sweetiepie boyfriend. (Moreso than his big brother, Tom’s ashamed to admit.) Like both Tom and Tyler, Chris’s girlfriend is Jewish, which had never even occurred to Tom until Leah learned this and started joking about it constantly. Leah claims, trying to be funny, “I don’t wanna be judged by my religion: I wanna be judged by the color of my skin!” but she nonetheless goes in darn hard for the Jewish-girlfriend jokes. And that’s cool. Tom sometimes gets uncomfortable when Leah makes dirty jokes around his male friends but truth be told he really loves how funny she is.
“She was born in South Orange,” says Tom. Tyler didn’t know Leah’s parents were from Newark. Tyler smiles for a moment, staring at the VHS freezeframe of the Bowery in 1976, and says, “One really awesome thing about your girlfriend? is she’s really, like, astonishingly effective at getting things done.” Tom laughs.
“Just like yesterday I was remembering what a, fuckin, endless, like, Three Stooges movie it was for us getting an apartment,” says Tyler. “Remember? And she and her roommate basically just spent a day in Prospect Park, right?” Tom nods. “That’s really cool,” says Tyler. “That’s really... I guess I just really dig the fact that she’s so much better than most people at getting shit done but she also almost never, like, cares to get shit done. She’s a really cool girl.
“She likes sex more than I do,” says Tom.
Tyler laughs. “Dude. There are worse things. My dear spoiled friend.
One Wednesday last winter after work – this is during the period when Tom was subbing for a secretary at Philip Morris who’d just had a kid – Tom and Tyler were at the Nameless Bar in the East Village (its name is Sophie’s, but nobody calls it that), shooting the shit about whatever, Tom drinking Coke and Tyler beer, and Joan Jett’s Crimson and Clover came on. And both cracked up immediately, and seeing each other crack up made them crack up even more, because they both knew that they both were remembering the omnipresence of the song in late high school and they both knew that they’d had more love for the song than they’d cared to admit at the time; whether or not this was all in Tom’s head it was a great feeling of connection and companionship and straight-up affection; Tyler made Tom let him buy a second round of drinks.
Eleven years ago today was July 26, 1977, and Thurston Moore was eighteen and had just moved here. From Connecticut, where he’s from. Eleven-thousand years ago today was July 26, 9013 BC, and the small band of humans here (not the Lenape’s ancestors: other people entirely) lived hunting mastodons, mammoths, and giant beavers. Three-hundred-fifty years ago today was July 26, 1638, and this was Nieuw Amsterdam, Director-general Wouter Van Twiller’s beaver-trading town; and as Dutchmen, the white inhabitants of these islands fancied themselves culturally superior to other white inhabitants of this continent. (Those, say, in Boston, where today the Pixies, this awesome new band, are out of.) One year ago today Tyler was twenty-two and had just moved here. From Connecticut, where he’s from.
If Tom tries to think seriously, be a grownup, about his life, all he can figure is that he likes acid, he likes New York, and he likes changing work-locations regularly. Temping through Kent Staffing for the next forty, forty-five years doesn’t sounds so bad. It’ll be hard to save up money for retirement if he keeps spending this much on acid, but he won’t be retirement age till February 17, 2030; he’s got plenty of time. “Can I borrow August rent?” asks Tom.
Gentle sigh. “Can’t you ask your parents?"
“My dad already said no."
“Dude, this really isn’t fair to me. What happens if I say no?"
“I don’t know."
“Listen, I, I’m sorry, I don’t wanna be an asshole. But maybe we shouldn’t renew the lease in September. And, it’s completely chill for you to borrow August. Of course."
“I’m gonna get a permanent job."
“I know.
“Maybe I could like be your tenant?"
“No dude I thought about that, and I really don’t wanna have a thing where I gotta like kick you out."
“That’s what you’re doing.” Tom suddenly reddening
“Tom, this really isn’t fair, this really isn’t right."
And Tom will soon start looking in the Voice for roommate ads. Tyler’s stubborn parents will once again refuse to pay for him to live in downtown Manhattan, so he’ll renew the lease here with a thirty-year-old bassist named Damon in Tom’s old room. Tom will start looking at places in the East Village and eventually take a tiny bedroom in this heavy-metal photographer’s place on A and Seventh
September. Not living with Tyler is actually really freeing. And although Tom still doesn’t get why Tyler found her “competence” so charming, there’s been a wonderful thing where once Tom stopped dropping acid alone, his June and July enthusiasm for like the crackling of wood or whatever gave way to a enthusiasm for his wisecracking, horny, socially conscious, TV-loving, height-fetish girlfriend Leah. He remembered her half-birthday and bought her a fancy lighter, which she loved. He went to the Arabic barber on Atlantic for a shorter haircut than he’d had in years and the very next fucking day got a job doing document review for a Third Avenue law firm, which he figured must have pleased her. He started talking frequently about maybe finding a roommate for a place in Prospect Park. He still has to tell her about all that acid; but, although it sounds like an excuse, it really is true that the more time that passes after he’s stopped completely, the less bad it’ll sound and the less angry she’ll be. He’ll tell her after he’s been in his new place a month, maybe.
And in any case, this September, this is amazing. Tom’s a new Tom. I mean what’s wonderful and beautiful about this summer is that as of just a few months ago, the person he is now didn’t exist: all Tom was was this selfish, self-absorbed, self-obsessed lazy slacker brat! Moping from office to office, living inside his Walkman, refusing to care about the existence of a world outside of Lower Manhattan! But now, thanks to this wonderdrug engineering of acid – thanks, jeez, to that God-given Dexter Haas encounter – he’s developed an entirely different relationship to the universe and to the past and the future and to the souls of other humans and just fucking everything. And he’s done with the drug now; he’s accepted what it had to give. And what it had to give has revolutionized his relationship with Leah! He hasn’t told her about the daytime drugtaking yet, but he knows he will eventually, because he’s conscious of her now, he’s concerned about her now, he no longer thinks of her as just a source of blowjobs and funny jokes.
Though she’ll start it just a few days from now, Leah breaking up with Tom will ultimately be an endless, six-or-seven-week process that will last until late October and involve really grotesque amounts of crying, like eleven different bouts of last-time sex, and an awful, humiliating morning at his new permanent receptionist job when Tom will be with some suits in an elevator in the American Express building and he’ll almost break into tears when You Send Me comes on the Muzak. Remembering playing with that awful fat tabby in Leah’s living room, the tabby trying to bat at people on TV... Idiocy. Once it’s clear the relationship’s doomed, though – that however many times they fuck or they hug really tight or Tom brings her bagels in bed or massages her ass or tongues whatever orifice, they will never be getting back together long-term – he will tell her, tearily apologetically, about his July acid-dropping. Which surprisingly won’t seem to bother her at all: she’ll say that that’s not a huge deal, that it’s okay he didn’t tell her, that she understands, and she’ll hug him really tight.
Whatever. Granted their whole relationship won’t have lasted more than a year and a half or so, but it’s still really harsh that a month after the breakup she’ll be sleeping with Pat Cartwright, a journalist friend of Antonia’s who’s attractive and has this kind of mumbling, self-effacing charm that enrages Tom. (That this Cartwright fuck wears glasses instead of contacts will come to symbolize for Tom his wow-I’m-cute, asshole qualities.) If she simply were leaving Tom for Pat her dumping him wouldn’t have been so drawn-out, emotional, and confused, so it isn’t that; and it’s sort of a lucky thing for all that Pat is only six-foot-one or so; but still, Tom will be nursing bitter feelings toward Leah pretty much up until she marries Pat in the summer of 1993. She says Tom seems to have changed this summer in ways she doesn’t like...
Leah and Pat will stay married for eighteen years, with one son and one daughter. For Tom’s part, although he’ll wonder about it on his own and talk to Tyler about it at length, he’ll never resolve his confusion about how it was that the same period of time which he saw making him a richer, deeper, more passionate and truly alive human being was, for her, the period which convinced her she didn’t wanna keep spending time with him.
Whatever: it ended: it’s over now: the secret is to give up wondering.
Onward.
Ian Washburn was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and grew up in Seattle, Washington. This is his first published story. He wrote it in Beijing and Brooklyn.
